Open-source fight on the 'wrong battleground'

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Imagination!

"You are ignoring the masses of workers, many of which use only one company application. Many others only need simple word processing, with email and web access."

I think that you are imagining these masses of workers, yearning to be free!

My company, for example, has about 7000 employees world-wide, 5000 or so in the US and uses Word and Excel forms for all of their internal reporting and employee admin activities. If you want to get your expense money, you fill out an excel spreadsheet form and submit it via sharepoint to your boss who sends it on up the chain. At various points, other reports are generated automatically so that budget center managers know daily what their costs are running versus plans, budgets, etc.. That's the part of MS Office that gets knocked for being susceptible to the e-mail bombs, but it is also the way that office is used in a corporation and the reason that companies continue to buy the real thing from MS. They have spent millions of bucks and multiple thousands of man-hours creating and refining these forms over the years and they run their business with them. Some jamokes from the OSS come along with a me-too that isn't 100% compatible with MS Office and think that is good enough since it is "free" are just kidding themselves. They don't get the business and then blame Microsoft for some under the table antic when it is their product that can't cut the mustard because they themselves haven't designed one that meets the market, just meets their limited perception of the market.

>have to then shell out over $300 to get the office suite.

Only for chumps, I think. We have a site agreement with Microsoft and it's a lot less than that per employee and everyone uses the MS Office functions daily. I looked at the Dell site and you can get the basic Office as an add-on for $129 with a new computer.

Posted by: Bill Weisgerber   Posted on: 11/14/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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